In early December, Quintillion completed the Phase 1 Alaska portion of its Quintillion Subsea Cable System, activated the first subsea cable under the Arctic Ocean. The Alaska portion of Quintillion Subsea Cable System consists of a 1,400 mile (2,250km) subsea and terrestrial fiber optic network, including a Arctic subsea trunk line from Prudhoe Bay to Nome with branching lines to Utqiaġvik, Wainwright, Point Hope, and Kotzebue. The terrestrial section runs from Prudhoe Bay to Fairbanks along the Dalton Highway, and connects to existing networks reaching Anchorage, Alaska, Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington, providing fiber link between the Continental United States and the North American Arctic.

CMC Telecom on last Thursday officially inaugurated its Cross Việt Nam Cable System (CVCS), which is the only system in Việt Nam directly connecting the Southeast-Asia grid. With a total length of more than 2,500km, the CVCS cable system passes through 19 provinces and cities in the country from the northern Lạng Sơn Province to the southern Tây Ninh Province. The CVCS cable system has a total investment of VNĐ500 billion (approximately US$22 million).

Sparkle, the international service provider of TIM Group and among top 10 global operators, announced on Monday the activation of the three fiber pairs Sparkle owns and manages on the new Seabras-1 cable, the first and only system directly connecting Sao Paulo, Brasil, to New York, USA. Customers can access Seabras-1 from Wall, NJ in the US and from Sao Paulo, Brasil and benefit the lower latency on the New York-Sao Paulo route which makes Sparkle’s network the largest, most advanced and reliable system in the Region.

New York, NY – December 7, 2017-Tiger Infrastructure Partners (“Tiger Infrastructure”) today announced it has made an investment in Crosslake Fibre (“Crosslake”). Crosslake was established to develop fibre-optic cable projects throughout North America, including a new submarine fibre-optic cable from Toronto, Canada to Buffalo, New York through Lake Ontario. The project, announced in May 2017, will be the first submarine cable system across Lake Ontario to directly connect Toronto and the United States.

The Monet consortium, including Algar Telecom, Angola Cables, Antel, Google and TE SubCom, has announced that the Monet Cable System (Monet) is now ready for service with commercial traffic due to begin shortly. The Monet Cable System spans 10,556km，connects Florida to Brazil，provides approximately 64Tbps of capacity and low latency solutions.

According to Zayo news press, New Cross Pacific (NCP) US Backhaul group, comprised of Chunghwa Telecom, KT Corporation, China Telecom, China Mobile International and China Unicom, has selected Zayo Group for a private dedicated network (PDN), to diversely backhaul traffic from its U.S. landing station across the western United States.

According to article at ZDNet by Corinne Reichert, Vocus Communications has announced passing the halfway point on its Australia Singapore Cable (ASC) project, with much of the progress so far being done on civil engineering works and manufacturing. The ASC subsea cable system, worth $170 million, will be laid between February and March 2018.

SBSS announced on Tuesday that they have received multiple contract awards across the submarine telecommunications and subsea oil and gas markets in Indonesia. In the latter PT Saipem have awarded SBSS the full cable installation scope for the BP Tangguh Phase 2 project.

Recently China’s President Xi announced that the first overseas military bases for his country started operating in Djibouti, by the Horn of Africa. Djibouti?

Djibouti is a small country in East Africa with less than one million inhabitants but is situated in a highly strategic part of the world, it is next to Mandeb Strait and to the entrance of Suez-Aden canal, hence close to most of the East — West commerce, including oil. However, in today’s internet economy this could be considered a side business; since the most important thing about Djibouti is that it is a node that gathers the majority of submarine cable systems that connect East and West, making this tiny country a critical part of the infrastructure on which we depend our internet.

CMC Telecom was nominated as one of the Top 5 most influential enterprises in Vietnam’s internet industry over the past decade (2007-2017) on Internet Day, November 22, at an event hosted by the Vietnam Internet Association in cooperation with ICTnews in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the internet in Vietnam.

The Top 5 Award was presented to the company for its efficient and excellent contributions to policies and strategies for internet growth in Vietnam, developing internet users, providing internet access to many more people, and growing value-added services (VAS) applications or digital services on the internet.

SEA-ME-WE 5 Submarine Cable System & Consortium won the Best Subsea Innovation award at the Global Carrier Awards 2017 in London on 25th October 2017. The SEA-ME-WE 5 consortium was awarded for one of the most ambitious and successful cable projects applying the most innovative technology connecting 3 continents (Asia, Europe and Africa).

With a record number of over 225 entries submitted for this year’s awards, all categories were judged by an independent panel of telecoms analysts, industry experts and the senior editorial team of Capacity Media.